Testing Our Sense of Social and Moral Responsibility with Social Technologies

Social technologies, in particular, Twitter has received much attention from the media recently. The value of most social technologies is that they enable people to connect and share, inform and generate content. Witness the political value, reaffirming that social technologies power to report demonstration in Iran as it unfolded. Thus, thinking that the ‘empowerment’ of users as one of the key attributes of the social technologies is not mistaken.

However, there are some worrying signs. For example, there have been some high profile suicide cases in South Korea resulted from the rumours that spread through the Internet network. Moreover, this networked online world has brought us an easy access to child pornography, religious extremists viewpoints etc. The Internet certainly has offered easy access to potentially everything. However, all these social ailments are not new at all. They have all existed but only a few had a means and interests to control over the content dissemination whether that was driven by political or business interests. Now then, what has changed?

Before the emergence of social technologies, we could blame the central power and their usage of tools in manipulating and forming of a public opinion. Edward Louise Bernays and the birth of PR has explain that very well. For example, in order to increase cigarette usage, presenting carefully designed stylish smoking female was all what they needed. However, such means and resources were only available to a few. Now that has changed.

With the emergence of social technologies, we can no longer blame the central power for propagating and manipulating our minds and behaviours. These new technologies have enabled us to check and give a balance to the power over information generation and its flow. Consequently, We now have only ourselves to blame. Our sense of social responsibility is now being put to a test. Can we free ourselves from information manipulation and propagation or are we ending up abusing the newly acquired power by ignoring social and moral responsibilities that individual users hold? Sadly, some of the examples I have pointed out in the above, paint a rather gloomy picture of future.

This is the testing time for all social technology users.